I believe that you can have closed source kernel modules (As they can be viewed as seperate "programs", just like how you can have closed source run with open libs).
However, if they were to changes to the kernel itself, then it would have to be opened.
So what if we hate M$? Go to any Mac site and you will hear simular stuff (they will focus more on the UI and "we did it first" then stability).
Most slashdot readers have decided that open standards/source are good things and are aginst any company who wants to do things in a closed way. Besides M$ is not the only company we hate, listed with M$ are AOL, Linux One (yes, a linux company), Sun (kinda, sorta, maby not). Basically anybody who pushes closed standards on people or rips people off. And no, Open Source is not about beating M$, it is about...making things open (humm...that would explain the name)!
Slashdot's karma thing is not supposed to insure that {everybody|idea|product} gets equil air time but instead supposed to elivate the comments the slashdot community finds interesting.
I assure you that if 200,000 windoze users were to suddenly decide that slashdot were the place to be that the comments would quickly turn pro M$ and anti anything else. Because the windoze users would be the new community and that would be what they want to hear. Yes there are abusers of the moderation system, but there are abusers at your Bank/Credit union too (no system is abuse proof).
Oh, and the GNOME/KDE wars are FUN!, while at the same time showing how both systems excell and what both systems lack. Besides we have not had a big GNOME/KDE war in some time.
KDE has a theme manager that will both tell QT what do do and change as many other things as possiable (such as the title bar style in the window manager, the icons used on the desktop...). It even tries to get Motif applications to chage their theme (just the default colors) as much as possiable (you have to restart them after you install a new theme, and I cannot change everything on a Motif application.) If you want an preview of this get KDE 2. There is also a theme control panel in KDE 1.1.2, but because KDE 1.x is based on QT 1.4 it cannot change as many things.
There are issues (at least I read about them) with threading needed in the Linux TCP/IP stack. I do not know how big this issue is, but study it yourself. I am also aware that Ext2 (or the Linux kernel in general) has a maximum of only 2GB on a 32bit computer. They only way I know around this is to use a 64bit computer. With you handling multi media I would think you could run into a 2GB limit quickly.
While I think it would be really cool if you could pull it off, the potential of disaster here is huge. Your primary objective here should be to get this system to work, and work well. Look carefully at the technologies you have available. If NT or Sun is the best way to go then, swallow your pride, and go do it that way. Give Linux another few years to evolve and be 100% ready for this kind of task. By then they will want a new system anyway.
But if Linux is not ready for the challenge, and you use it anyway, you will make the OS _AND_ the project look bad, and many of the not-so-technical tech people will wary to try either again very soon. And, needles to say, this would give Microsoft more ammunition.
Sorry I can't give you much than this.
FYI: I use Linux as my primary (only) OS at home and (before I graduated) was the administrator of my High School's Linux web server. I love the OS but we need to be carefull not to say it can do things it can't.
Yes it does hurt. I like my OS and want it to be the best. However we are going to do something that the Windows people can't do when they find a problem in their OS....we are going to fix it.
A few years ago I was into software piracy. Nothing too huge (I was not running Internet servers with pirated software) but my whole system (including OS) was pirated from friends and family.
I never thought much of it. In fact I enjoyed it, getting around anti-piracy software was a great challenge. I never thought I was hurting anybody. After all stealing software (and that is what piracy is) is not like stealing most other things. Most times when you steal something from somebody the person you stole it from will notice the absence of the object. However with software you can quickly (and most times easily) make a COPY! Nobody ever notices you took it from him or her.
The only thing that really stops the pirate is when they realize what they are doing. They are stealing...even if the owner does not realize it. When the pirate comes to a point of moral maturity in their life they will stop pirating. Because they realize it is wrong, period.
It comes down to the simple question of; will you seal something even if nobody notices?
This I think is the basic problem with piracy. Most people do not think piracy is wrong because most people do not identify it as steeling (because there is no missing object), and those who do know it to be steeling answer yes to the above question.
Re:I guess KDE is ok if you really want MS Windows
on
The KDE Future
·
· Score: 1
But I want things to work like that!
Not really...but...
Perhaps an example would help. (This is going to sound a lot like MS Word and Outlook).
What I want is the ability to go into KMail and select via an option what I want to use as an e-mail composer/viewer. Basic options like "Built in" would be compiled (perhaps) into the program. But what would be neat is if you could change it to KWord (is that the name of the program?) so that you could do text formatting (with automatic conversion to/from text/plain or text/html).
This is kinda possiable now as KMail developers can get the code for KWord and incorporate it into the program. However this creates code duplication (bug duplication) and means that I am still restricted to using either the ones that KMail people send with the program or I must find a way to incorportate it on my own (assuming I am a good developer). And then there is the the _really_ scary possiability (from non-developer standpoint) of somebody rewriting KMail to use parts of the KWord code to get a better composer but it is released as a patch. So now I (as a simple user) must download but the correct KMail sources, and the patch, recompile and install the application.
As for myself I would not mind recompiling a program to get extra functions. But we must realize where Linux appears to be going. In order for it to become #1 people _have_ to have the ability to download pre-compiled packages from the net and run them though some sort of GUI installer. If KOM works the way I think it will I can still have KMail pick up KWords extra functions WITHOUT HAVING TO RECOMPILE. After I install KWord it registers itself saying "I can be an HTML or plain text editor" and next time I start KMail I can reconfigure it to use KWord.
Perhaps KOM cannot do all of this but I hope it can.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that you can have closed source kernel modules (As they can be viewed as seperate "programs", just like how you can have closed source run with open libs).
However, if they were to changes to the kernel itself, then it would have to be opened.
The howto was a Joke.
So what if we hate M$? Go to any Mac site and you will hear simular stuff (they will focus more on the UI and "we did it first" then stability).
Most slashdot readers have decided that open standards/source are good things and are aginst any company who wants to do things in a closed way. Besides M$ is not the only company we hate, listed with M$ are AOL, Linux One (yes, a linux company), Sun (kinda, sorta, maby not). Basically anybody who pushes closed standards on people or rips people off. And no, Open Source is not about beating M$, it is about...making things open (humm...that would explain the name)!
Slashdot's karma thing is not supposed to insure that {everybody|idea|product} gets equil air time but instead supposed to elivate the comments the slashdot community finds interesting.
I assure you that if 200,000 windoze users were to suddenly decide that slashdot were the place to be that the comments would quickly turn pro M$ and anti anything else. Because the windoze users would be the new community and that would be what they want to hear. Yes there are abusers of the moderation system, but there are abusers at your Bank/Credit union too (no system is abuse proof).
Oh, and the GNOME/KDE wars are FUN! , while at the same time showing how both systems excell and what both systems lack. Besides we have not had a big GNOME/KDE war in some time.
There is a 5 volt power supply.
But those 5 volts don't go very far, about the most I have seen them be able to do is run a 3.5" floppy drive.
>My question (which was rhetorical; I already knew the answer to said question was "no") was about KDE 1.x...
I withdraw my flame then. Sorry.
Yes, everything.
KDE has a theme manager that will both tell QT what do do and change as many other things as possiable (such as the title bar style in the window manager, the icons used on the desktop...). It even tries to get Motif applications to chage their theme (just the default colors) as much as possiable (you have to restart them after you install a new theme, and I cannot change everything on a Motif application.) If you want an preview of this get KDE 2. There is also a theme control panel in KDE 1.1.2, but because KDE 1.x is based on QT 1.4 it cannot change as many things.
There are issues (at least I read about them) with threading needed in the Linux TCP/IP stack. I do not know how big this issue is, but study it yourself. I am also aware that Ext2 (or the Linux kernel in general) has a maximum of only 2GB on a 32bit computer. They only way I know around this is to use a 64bit computer. With you handling multi media I would think you could run into a 2GB limit quickly.
While I think it would be really cool if you could pull it off, the potential of disaster here is huge. Your primary objective here should be to get this system to work, and work well. Look carefully at the technologies you have available. If NT or Sun is the best way to go then, swallow your pride, and go do it that way. Give Linux another few years to evolve and be 100% ready for this kind of task. By then they will want a new system anyway.
But if Linux is not ready for the challenge, and you use it anyway, you will make the OS _AND_ the project look bad, and many of the not-so-technical tech people will wary to try either again very soon. And, needles to say, this would give Microsoft more ammunition.
Sorry I can't give you much than this.
FYI: I use Linux as my primary (only) OS at home and (before I graduated) was the administrator of my High School's Linux web server. I love the OS but we need to be carefull not to say it can do things it can't.
Yes it does hurt. I like my OS and want it to be the best. However we are going to do something that the Windows people can't do when they find a problem in their OS....we are going to fix it.
A few years ago I was into software piracy. Nothing too huge (I was not running Internet servers with pirated software) but my whole system (including OS) was pirated from friends and family.
I never thought much of it. In fact I enjoyed it, getting around anti-piracy software was a great challenge. I never thought I was hurting anybody. After all stealing software (and that is what piracy is) is not like stealing most other things. Most times when you steal something from somebody the person you stole it from will notice the absence of the object. However with software you can quickly (and most times easily) make a COPY! Nobody ever notices you took it from him or her.
The only thing that really stops the pirate is when they realize what they are doing. They are stealing...even if the owner does not realize it. When the pirate comes to a point of moral maturity in their life they will stop pirating. Because they realize it is wrong, period.
It comes down to the simple question of; will you seal something even if nobody notices?
This I think is the basic problem with piracy. Most people do not think piracy is wrong because most people do not identify it as steeling (because there is no missing object), and those who do know it to be steeling answer yes to the above question.
But I want things to work like that!
Not really...but...
Perhaps an example would help. (This is going to sound a lot like MS Word and Outlook).
What I want is the ability to go into KMail and select via an option what I want to use as an e-mail composer/viewer. Basic options like "Built in" would be compiled (perhaps) into the program. But what would be neat is if you could change it to KWord (is that the name of the program?) so that you could do text formatting (with automatic conversion to/from text/plain or text/html).
This is kinda possiable now as KMail developers can get the code for KWord and incorporate it into the program. However this creates code duplication (bug duplication) and means that I am still restricted to using either the ones that KMail people send with the program or I must find a way to incorportate it on my own (assuming I am a good developer). And then there is the the _really_ scary possiability (from non-developer standpoint) of somebody rewriting KMail to use parts of the KWord code to get a better composer but it is released as a patch. So now I (as a simple user) must download but the correct KMail sources, and the patch, recompile and install the application.
As for myself I would not mind recompiling a program to get extra functions. But we must realize where Linux appears to be going. In order for it to become #1 people _have_ to have the ability to download pre-compiled packages from the net and run them though some sort of GUI installer. If KOM works the way I think it will I can still have KMail pick up KWords extra functions WITHOUT HAVING TO RECOMPILE. After I install KWord it registers itself saying "I can be an HTML or plain text editor" and next time I start KMail I can reconfigure it to use KWord.
Perhaps KOM cannot do all of this but I hope it can.